This is a replication of Tyler and Bro's study (1992) on the effect of discourse level phenomena on audience perception of comprehensibility. 53 Chinese students of English and 10 native English speakers were take...This is a replication of Tyler and Bro's study (1992) on the effect of discourse level phenomena on audience perception of comprehensibility. 53 Chinese students of English and 10 native English speakers were taken as informants to a questionnaire, in which orders of ideas, discourse miscues and other types of errors (e.g. cohesion and redundant ideas, etc.) were used as variables to see whether they could affect the comprehensibility of texts. Strong resemblances were found between the two groups. Order of ideas (i.e. deductive or inductive) seems not to have affected text comprehensibility much, but the interactive cumulating miscues at the discourse level played an important role in discourse comprehension. As disparities are found between what nonnative speakers do and how they react to what they have done, the paper discusses whether people think the way they write, and if linguistic competence correlates with cognitive ability. The paper suggests that knowing and doing are two aspects of learning; teachers of English, therefore, have to understand the perplexities second language learners face and try to help them write as effectively as possible in the target language.展开更多
文摘This is a replication of Tyler and Bro's study (1992) on the effect of discourse level phenomena on audience perception of comprehensibility. 53 Chinese students of English and 10 native English speakers were taken as informants to a questionnaire, in which orders of ideas, discourse miscues and other types of errors (e.g. cohesion and redundant ideas, etc.) were used as variables to see whether they could affect the comprehensibility of texts. Strong resemblances were found between the two groups. Order of ideas (i.e. deductive or inductive) seems not to have affected text comprehensibility much, but the interactive cumulating miscues at the discourse level played an important role in discourse comprehension. As disparities are found between what nonnative speakers do and how they react to what they have done, the paper discusses whether people think the way they write, and if linguistic competence correlates with cognitive ability. The paper suggests that knowing and doing are two aspects of learning; teachers of English, therefore, have to understand the perplexities second language learners face and try to help them write as effectively as possible in the target language.
